Rennie Davis, One of many Chicago Seven, Traded Activism for Internal Peace
On a cool spring night time in 1973, greater than 1,000 individuals — college students, activists, hippies, religious seekers — crammed right into a ballroom on the College of California, Berkeley. That they had come to listen to Rennie Davis, then 32 and one of the vital admired antiwar activists within the nation, speak about altering the world. Davis was nothing wanting a celeb. Two years earlier, he helped set up the huge Could Day protests towards the Vietnam Struggle, and in 1969, he and 6 males, who would come to be referred to as the Chicago Seven, had been charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot exterior the Democratic Nationwide Conference. Davis was one among solely two defendants to testify in the course of the raucous, extremely publicized trial, which featured a parade of colourful characters, together with an unhinged decide and the protection witnesses Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary.
Davis was recognized for being even-tempered and a relentless organizer, however he mixed his seriousness of function with charisma and an infectious optimism. Whereas he’s portrayed within the 2020 Aaron Sorkin movie “The Trial of the Chicago 7” as a nerd who “couldn’t promote water to a thirsty man within the desert,” as his fellow Sixties activist Frank Joyce put it to me, Davis was really one of many antiwar motion’s most charming audio system.
Davis would want these expertise in Berkeley, the place he had come to ship a surprising message: Activism, he now believed, had failed to repair a damaged nation. The brand new resolution — to conflict, poverty, racism — was religious enlightenment. “I’m actually blissed out with a capital ‘B,’” Davis instructed the gang. “We’re working beneath a brand new management, and it’s divine. It’s actually going to remodel this planet into what we’ve all the time hoped and dreamed for.”
The “new management” had an unlikely frontman: a car-obsessed 15-year-old Indian named Guru Maharaj Ji, dubbed the “excellent grasp.” (Writers and activists who struggled to know his attraction most well-liked to name him different issues, together with “the fats child” and “the paunchy preadolescent mystical magnate.”) Maharaj Ji, who now goes by Prem Rawat, was one among numerous gurus who gained recognition within the West on the time; {the teenager}’s group, known as Divine Mild Mission, had an estimated 50,000 followers together with a whole bunch of facilities and ashrams throughout america. Appearing as each devotee and spokesman, Davis insisted Maharaj Ji would carry peace to the world. “God is now on this planet,” he introduced throughout a radio interview.
Davis’s message was catnip to Maharaj Ji’s followers in Berkeley, who danced and positioned Easter lilies subsequent to an image of the boy on a linen-draped altar. However then got here the catcalls. “We saved you out of jail, we got here to Chicago, and now what are you doing to us?” somebody yelled at Davis. “Kiss my lotus ass,” one other sneered. Activists with “fury bleeding out of each wound,” as one author put it then, hurled tomatoes at their former idol. A homeless man — or prophet, one couldn’t make sure — interrupted Davis with cheeky Buddhist riddles.
Issues had not gone a lot smoother at the same occasion in New York Metropolis. There, Davis tried in useless to persuade the gang {that a} religious focus was “completely in keeping with the progressivism and values of political activist work,” in accordance with Jay Craven, a younger activist and filmmaker who was in attendance. Not like others in that crowd, he wasn’t stunned by what Davis was now promoting. Craven had just lately returned from visiting Davis in India, the place they’d sat collectively on the banks of the Ganges whereas Davis, trying ethereal in a flowing white cotton tunic, spoke of “the extraordinary white mild he skilled when Maharaj Ji put his palms on his brow and utilized strain to his eyeballs.”
Craven left India befuddled, a confusion shared by nearly everybody who knew Davis. Because the journalist Ted Morgan wrote on this journal in 1973, summarizing the response to Davis’s conversion, “Nothing fairly like this had occurred since Augustine defected from Neoplatonism to Christianity.” However there had been indicators that Davis was altering, particularly after the Could Day protests in Washington, D.C. “I by no means for a minute believed we might actually shut down Washington, however I feel Rennie, who was all the time a grandiose thinker, really did,” Craven instructed me. Disillusioned, Davis largely stepped again from the fracturing antiwar motion. As a substitute, there have been acid journeys, New Age curiosities and discuss of spending a 12 months within the Sierra Mountains.
Davis wasn’t alone in abandoning political work for meditation and a perception in effecting social change by means of inside change. The early and mid-Seventies noticed “the wholesale transformation of many radicals and activists to new mystical religions,” the sociologist Stephen A. Kent writes in his 2001 e book “From Slogans to Mantras.” The socialist newspaper Staff’ Energy believed Davis and others had “discovered the incorrect lesson and determined that politics doesn’t work. So, for those who can’t change the world, change your self.” One of many interval’s loudest critics of the guru worship exhibited by Davis and others was the author and biochemist Robert S. de Ropp, who lamented that one may practice a canine “and have him offered as the right Grasp, and I truthfully consider he’d get a following!”
Maharaj Ji’s following was rising by 1973, a lot in order that Davis hoped he may fill the Houston Astrodome for the guru’s look and kick-start “the best transformation within the historical past of human civilization.” The three-day occasion was poorly attended and, unsurprisingly, didn’t carry peace to Earth. When a reporter caught up with Davis in 1977, he had just lately moved out of a Divine Mild Mission ashram. He was now not a public determine, he stated, as a result of he noticed “the method of cleansing up the world as the method of cleansing up your individual act first.” Davis was now promoting insurance coverage, as mirrored within the headline: “Sixties Activist Rennie Davis Now a ‘Straight.’”
However the remainder of Davis’s life can hardly be described as standard. After the failure of an organization he co-founded to put money into ecologically transformational applied sciences, he dropped out of society to spend the higher a part of 4 years residing and meditating on the backside of the Grand Canyon. Ultimately he teamed up together with his third spouse to show meditation and construct what they known as a “new humanity” motion, one “bigger than the Renaissance, the American Revolution and the ’60s mixed.”
Nonetheless, Davis remained happy with the political activism of his youthful years. In 2013, he flew to Vietnam with different antiwar leaders from the ’60s to have a good time the fortieth anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords. In keeping with Frank Joyce, who was on the journey, a few of the long-simmering tensions between activists and Davis resurfaced. “However Rennie was fully comfy in his personal pores and skin and actually did have inside peace,” Joyce instructed me. “That may be powerful for individuals to know. To some leftists, inside peace may be fairly irritating.”
Till his loss of life this 12 months from lymphoma, Davis was nonetheless predicting an imminent revolution that will rework the world. However as he made clear in “The New Humanity,” his breathtakingly optimistic 2017 e book, the revolution will want each an inward and outward focus. Although “some activists could need to keep consumed with anger,” he wrote, that alone received’t save us. “We should heal as a species — beginning with ourselves.”
Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a contributing author for the journal, a Nationwide fellow at New America and an affiliate professor at Emerson Faculty. He’s at work on a e book about transformation and id change.
